Chapter Text
Lit up in green, Bruno Madrigal’s own face turns around, locking eyes with the real man himself amidst the swirling sands. He looks on in awe as his shadow self embraces a strange woman, adoration shining out of her eyes. She bends forward and picks up…an infant…
No, he has long accepted it is too late. Even before the Wall Years. Living life on the outskirts and watching his sisters had shown him that; Julieta and Pepa have always been vivacious, respected, belonging. He has been an onlooker to their marital bliss with men who happily ensured the continuation of the Madrigal name, the children, all while he skulked in corners with rats and prophecies and talking to himself. Drifting further and further away until…
Three months ago his brave niece Mirabel turned things around. Bruno left his walls (but still saw the rats) and lived with the family again, even going into town sometimes, breaking the total isolation. At fifty, he has long accepted that he was never to have a wife and children of his own, and is content with being with his family and the younger generation as Tio Bruno.
Bruno hides the tablet away and decides not to share it with anyone. This one may not be bad…but it isn’t important enough to Encanto to need telling. It must be nearing dinnertime. He stands, and resolves to push the vision out of his mind.
Weeks later, Dolores spends a whole breakfast shaking and tapping her foot so intensely that the table itself trembles.
“Enough!” Abuela Alma has been trying to have more patience, really, but this was just too distracting. “What ever is the matter, Lolo?…Mija. Are you troubled?”
Bruno caught sight of Mirabel smiling. They’d both noticed the stubborn old woman making an effort to look out for her family as people. Not just Gifts.
“I can hear something…far away, not in town.” Dolores’s voice quivers. “Jesucristo. A woman in the jungle, I think past the passage in the mountain.” A new, Miracle-given addition that had allowed several friendly visitors to Encanto in the last months.
Dolores continues. “She is in great need of help. She cries that her daughter is grievously wounded and will surely die. The girl is too weak to move.”
“How far?” asked Julieta.
“Ah, I wish I could speak back to them!…From the volume, I think not too far. Some of us could make it today.”
An hour later, Dolores, Luisa, Mirabel and Antonio set off, along with a healthy supply of Julieta’s cooking. Bruno smiles after them. His brave sobrinos. And Alma goes to inform the townsfolk that Luisa may not be available until the next morning, with more grace than she might have in the past.
With assistance from Dolores’s hearing and Antonio’s animals, the Madrigal brigade tracks down the distressed woman by late afternoon. Her shouts had dissolved into wordless sobs and whispered prayers. Dolores hears them clear as day - a day when mama is happy, she wryly thinks - and her heart has been aching for the woman.
They come upon a small clearing. Two figures rest at the base of a large tree.
“Dios mio! Who are you?” shrieks the woman, pushing matted caramel-coloured hair out of her face. She sits up against the tree trunk, face gaunt and tear-streaked, dark eyes wild with fear. “Mi vida…mijita… Dayanara…” That must be the teenager collapsed almost totally flat, eyes shut. Her hair looks like it had been hacked off with shears, and a long deep gash weeps across her bare stomach. A sickly, yellow-coloured pus spills over the wound.
“Do you want some arepas?” Mirabel cheerily asks. The woman’s eyes darken in suspicion.
Dolores facepalms.
In the end, they convince the woman to bring her daughter with them to Encanto, where Julieta’s meals start making work of healing Dayanara’s injury. They give her antiseptic and a cloth to wipe down the wound. After this, the mother is more akin to talking. She tells them her name, Ximena Salas.
“What has happened?” Julieta asks as she fixed a bowl of porridge for Ximena; she had no serious injuries but this brew would perk her up, fix the cuts and abrasions that littered the visible skin. Besides, she looked so thin! “How did you and your hija end up out there?”
Ximena does not speak, trembling in her seat as she pulls one of Mirabel’s thick handmade blankets across her shoulders.
(How could Julieta have let mama treat Mira this way for so many years? Such beautiful craftsmanship!)
“Ximena,” Julieta tries again. “We mean you no harm. Why, my own hijas and their primos spent so long looking for-”
“I am wary because of that. How did they find me? Why?”
Reciting the story of the Madrigals’ miracles is easy. Julieta could have said it in her sleep. Ximena thinks it over. Glances over at Dayanara, sleeping peacefully on a daybed, her wound shrunk thinner and the infection almost gone.
“Then I thank you greatly, Señora Madrigal. As your sobrina heard, I really feared she would die.” Ximena’s eyes mist over. “Daya is all I have.”
“Buenas tardes - who?” Julieta watches her brother jump two feet into the air. There’s a rat on his shoulder, and she wishes he’d stop bringing them everywhere, but she hasn’t talked to Ximena about Bruno yet either. They all have their twisted habits, don’t they?
“This is Ximena Salas. Ximena, mi hermano, Bruno-”
And then Bruno sprints out of the room.
“Dios mio,” groans Isabela from across the room, where she is reading another of her botany books. “He’s normally less weird than that. Still weird, don’t get me wrong.”
To Julieta’s surprise, Ximena’s dry, cracked lips form a smile. “That was a strangely well-cared-for rat. I could tell.”
Julieta laughs uncomfortably. “I love my brother very much, but all familias have their eccentrics…”
In response, the other woman laughs too, but genuinely. “Oh, no. I suppose they would make quite good pets. Dayanara always loved her squirrels.”
The reality of the situation didn’t hit Bruno until he was back in his room. The new casita had one that was less foreboding (and contained fewer stairs) than the old one. At this point, a blessing.
It was her. The woman from the vision. The same wide dark eyes and long light hair, the same angular cheekbones. And from the snippets of chatter he’d heard she came with her own daughter.
The future is not set in stone - the tablets are breakable. He does not know this woman, and will not have to. The family will settle them in Encanto and they will be like any other townsfolk. They are only here to rest, aren’t they?
Except one night turns into two turns into a week. Now that she isn’t fighting for her daughter’s survival, Ximena Salas withdraws into herself, spending hours and hours sat in place staring, barely speaking. Her Dayanara really enjoys the company of the younger Madrigals. She apparently has a knack for gardening, and helps Isabela each morning. Listens to Antonio’s animal tales. Cheerfully helps with everybody’s chores. They cannot ask a fourteen year-old, newly healed from a grievous injury, to pick up the pieces of her mother in a strange house all alone. Casita always has a spare room for those who need it.
“This is strange…but can I pet your rats?” the girl asks Bruno one day before dinner, just after she finishes helping Mirabel set the table. The Salas pair have been eating dinners with them, and it doesn’t feel strange. Except for Ximena at the end, wearing the same blank stare, hardly touching her food.
Bruno raises an eyebrow. “I mean…people normally - are you sure?”
“Yes. I miss my own pets.” Dayanara answers grimly. “Please. We had to…” And she turns away, suddenly crestfallen.
They are not harmful, or at least don’t appear to be, not now or in any visions. He does not know what happened to the girl yet his heart breaks for her.
“Of course.” he answers, mustering up the same avuncular tenderness he uses with his sobrinos. “I don’t take them all out at once, though.” Two rats had been the compromise ever since he went home home.
He gets halfway to his room with her before realising that he shouldn't invite a young girl who doesn’t know him inside. Her mother - Ximena - may very well be displeased. “Wait, let me retrieve them.”
So Bruno does. He and Dayanara play with the rats. Just sat in the courtyard, while Ximena watches from her sofa, behind the open doorway. It feels as natural as breathing.
The next morning, Bruno is waylaid by Julieta, tugging on his arm. Her expression is pleading. “Bruno, could you maybe speak to Ms. Salas? She…she is reminding me of you.” his sister admits in a whisper. “After seeing something distressing. You have come back from that.”
Even if it took a decade. The words hang in the air between them. Bruno gives a bitter laugh. “Oh, you think she will relate?” Who else is cursed this way?
“No, of course not…just try? My Gift has its limits, you know, it can’t heal the mind! And everybody’s tried to bring her round. Not even Antonio snaps her out of it!”
Bruno does feel a jolt of concern at that. Pepa’s youngest is adorable, just a delightful pint-sized bundle of confidence. He improves everybody’s mood…doesn’t he?
“…It’s only you who hasn’t spoken to the lady, hermanito.”
Of course she’s right, Julieta always is. He has been avoiding her, because of the vision but also because her catatonia reminds him of his own blank states. That is a place the Gift brought him to many a time in his younger days, starting almost the day he received it. Now, he is better with it, but any reminder of that complete numbness overcoming him is disquieting.
Julieta’s face falls. “You do not have to, I only meant to-”
The words slip out. “I’ll say something.” It’s been a year for change. Maybe Bruno’s now ready to speak easily with strangers. To confront the fog - even if it somebody else’s.
The vision of Ximena - it is that woman, it’s unmistakeable - dances in his head.
“Thank you.” Ximena whispers upon seeing Bruno approaching; even after running away at first sight, he had been so important to the warm Madrigal welcome she and Dayanara have received, in his own way. Still too good to be true, isn’t it? She continues to wait for the other shoe to drop, for reality to tear through this good fortune.
“Th - th - what are you thanking me for, Señora Salas?” he stutters out.
“For Dayanara.”
“I - what -”
“Mijita, she is happier here. With your sobrina’s plants, your animals…”
“You…you like the rats?”
“…Curious creatures.” she murmurs. It’s all she can say, and she hates herself for not being able to speak well to these kind people who give so much and ask nothing. She is trapped within a slow and strange body, every tiny word or action a huge effort. Appearing an empty shell, but she feels a bit like Ximena Salas underneath. “It’s…fun.”
“Should…should I find them? And your hija?”
“No…leave Daya. She needs…people.”
Just then, Dayanara arrives downstairs, approaching her mother on the couch. She has several of the rats in tow - peeking out of a pocket, on her shoulder, curled in one hand.
“They like you.” Bruno notes with a kind smile.
“Mama! I have…you’re still.” The girl’s face falls as she pushes a bunch of strange bright flowers towards Ximena. “Isabela made these.”
Ximena slowly straightens and takes them. “Thank you…thank you mijita. You are the best hija I could ever have prayed for.” One of the rats crawls from Daya’s arm onto Ximena’s lap. Another tiny smile.
“I’ll just…um, go.” Bruno stands and turns away, but two voices call back to him.
“Oh, no, señor Madrigal. Stay.” Though both speak in monotoned unison, their voices are sweet and musical to his ears.
Later, as evening draws close, Julieta returns from town to see her brother and the Salas family sitting on the floor, with the rats and some of Tonito’s animals - a capybara, a few squirrels. And they seem in harmony. Ximena smiles, eyes still closed but content. Dayanara appears to be reciting something under her breath to Bruno, who listens carefully, with a serene smile.